The Long View David Farrell | Anthony Haughey | Jackie Nickerson | Richard Mosse | Paul Seawright | Donovan Wylie

1 The Long View

1 July – 28 August 2011

A group show with works by

David Farrell Anthony Haughey Richard Mosse Jackie Nickerson Paul Seawright Donovan Wylie

Introduction © Justin Carville, Ph.D

Curated by Tanya Kiang and Trish Lambe

Cover image: David Farrell, ‘Cogalstown Wood, Wilkinstown’, from the series Small Acts of Memory, 26 September 2009 © David Farrell

Back cover image: Donovan Wylie, ‘Golf 40 facing South East’, from the series British Watchtowers, 2005 © Donovan Wylie

Image right: Paul Seawright, ‘Police’, from the series Conflicting Account, 2009 © Paul Seawright

The Gallery of Photography is proud to be supported by The Arts Council and Dublin City Council.

2 Gallery of Photography Ireland is delighted to present a review of the 2011 group exhibition The Long View, which brought together, for the first time, work by Irish artists with considerable international reputations and whose photographs are represented in major collections worldwide.

The featured works are the result of a sustained process of engagement over periods of months or even years. The exhibition addresses questions of landscape and memory, history and social change in both Irish and more global contexts. It explores a particular strand of international practice, showcasing what can be called ‘considered’ or ‘decelerated’ photography. The featured photographers are part of this tradition seeking to work against the disposable and short-sighted nature of 21st-century mass media practices, and their photographs are the result of a sustained process of engagement over periods of months or even years. The work thus marks an important counterpoint to the increas- ingly disposable nature of photographic images in the digital world.

The curators would like to thank the artists, Justin Carville, Pete Reddy, the Arts Council, Dublin City Council, Leszek, Maureen & Mark at Fire, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, Mil- lennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, PhotoIreland Festival, Stephen Snoddy, Look11 Liverpool, Belfast Exposed and Magnum Photos.

For further information about the exhibition, please visit our resources page at www.galleryofphotography.ie

Cover image: © David Farrell Images: © the artists Essay: © Justin Carville, Ph.D

Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland T. +3531-6714654 www.galleryofphotography.ie

3 Photographers

David Farrell explores the sensitive subject of the search for those who were ‘disappeared’ by the Republican movement, in a series of landscape studies from a project that has spanned over a decade.

Anthony Haughey addresses the spectral presence of ghost estates on the contemporary landscape. Through Haughey’s lens, these eerie ‘monuments’ are a testament to the end of Ireland’s gold rush and the resulting cost of unregulated growth.

Richard Mosse also explores the visual possibilities of the monumental, in both the subject matter and the sublime scale of his work. Mosse recasts the sculptural form of an airplane wreck into a powerful symbol of the failure of modernity.

Jackie Nickerson also works on a very large scale and in a global context, but she focusses on how we inhabit our ordinary, everyday worlds, presenting her own, often ambivalent, subjective position. Made over a ten-year period, the work on show explores the interplay between the global and the local in the newly affluent Gulf states.

Paul Seawright recovers visual fragments and texts from the surfaces of the urban landscape of his native Belfast. The work examines the continued play of competing claims to meaning and identity in a post-conflict context.

Donovan Wylie presents two bodies of work which operate on widely different registers. In his cool, objective aerial survey of British Watchtowers along the border, he deftly turns the surveyor into the surveyed; while in Scrapbook, he presents ‘the Troubles’ as an intimate aspect of lived experience, in a radical mix-up of the private and the public.

A full-colour publication with a text by Justin Carville accompanies the exhibition, first published in 2011.

Justin Carville, Ph.D teaches Historical & Theoretical Studies in Photography at the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dún Laoghaire, Ireland.

4 lie hidden beneath the bound surface of Enduring the image.

Vision In the initial response to this straight- The Optics of The Long forward request, Plato immediately complicates any forthright attempt to View define representation with more abstract considerations; “Then it is not very likely I shall!’ ‘Oh, I don’t know’, I said. ‘Short sight Justin Carville, Ph.D is sometimes quicker than long sight’”.3 The pursuit to define the nature of representation is suddenly dulled by corporeal vision, and in turn corporeal vision is In book Ten of Plato’s Socratic dialogue warped by temporality and distance. For The Republic, a question is posited on the Plato, rational sight is corrupted by the nature of representation. It initiates the myopia of the human eye, emphasising at eventual dismissal of the artist’s ability the very outset the scepticism with which to represent anything other than a shad- the designation of ‘representation’ and the owy reflection of a distant reality thrice ‘image’ must be viewed. removed.1 In a syntax which betrays its searing interrogation of the contiguity The history of representation and the phi- of image to reality, the question that is losophy of the image are bound to the in- bluntly proposed for deliberation is: “Can creased myopia of Western visual culture. you give me a general definition of repre- The evolutionary arch of mimetic forms sentation? I’m not sure I know, myself, of image production is a reflection of the exactly what it is”.2 Frequently in the realm West’s cultural fetish for the increased of critical enquiry, the more direct the veracity of pictorial images.4 With the ad- question, the more complex its subject ap- vent of technically reproduced imagery, pears to become. Hanging in the rarefied the desire for pictorial verisimilitude has air of philosophical reflection, this simplest combined with the urge, as Walter of questions lingers in anticipation of a Benjamin described it, ‘to bring things more contemplative response to the blunt closer spatially and humanly ... by way of manner in which it was asked. Through its likeness, its reproduction’.5 its plainly stated form, this modest query harbours the potential to unravel the 3The Republic, p. 371 (my emphasis) intricacies of representation which usually 4 This of course is a technically determined perspective of Western modernity espoused by media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan. See for example Marshall McLuhan, ‘In- 1 Plato, The Republic, trans. H.D.P. Lee, (London: Penguin side the Five Sense Sensorium’ in David Howes, ed. Empire Classics), 1987, pp. 371-74. The classic interpretation of Pla- of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, to’s iconophobia in the context of photography is of course 2005), p. 43-52 Susan Sontag’s in the opening chapter of On Photography 5 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechani- (London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 3-24 cal Reproduction’, 1936, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn 2The Republic, p. 371 (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 217

5 Anthony Haughey ‘Untitled VI’, from the series Settlement, 2011 Lambda c-print facemounted to plexi © Courtesy of the artist

6 In the history of ileging of the ‘now’ in the instantaneous technological looking, landscape of images. Photography con- photography sits in the stitutes a rush to judgement, a quickening of the perception and reception of things. departure lounge of this The mass media use photography in pre- inevitable journey towards cisely this way. Accelerating the disposal of one redundant photograph by another the privileging of the redundant photograph, the mass media ‘now’ in the instantaneous limit any response to the image by re- stricting its temporal presence before the landscape of images. gaze of the observer to the arrival of the next instantaneous image of catastrophe.7 Mimetic capacity and distance have co- Yet photography remains in the departure alesced in the realm of technical imagery lounge only, it follows the journey but does to the extent that the close proximity of not become a willing passenger. Its optic the viewer to the world as image as much is split; it is both embedded in the myopia as the image’s pictorial veracity have of the visual field yet resistant to its cul- become a marker of realism. In the arena tural logic. Its other optic is the antithesis of digital imagery, the perpetual communi- of the accelerated myopia identified by cation of the internet and mobile technol- Virilio and other media philosophers as ogies, mimesis and distance have in turn characteristic of the dystopian image been enveloped by speed. The logic of the environment of contemporary culture. This image-world that now prevails has result- other optic is the ‘long view’, an enduring, ed in mimesis and proximity collapsing decelerated gaze that steps back from the under the weight of instantaneity. In con- object it represents. temporary visual culture, ‘real-time’ and the accelerated consumption of images David Farrell’s Small Acts of Memory is have now come to determine accessibility exemplary of photography’s other optic. to the real. The French cultural theorist Following his 2000 series Innocent Land- Paul Virilio has observed that through this scapes, Farrell has continued to photo- instantaneous image world ‘humanity is graph the sites of the excavations of the struck with myopia’, sight is subjected to ‘disappeared’.8 This has been a periodic a sudden foreclosure, a narrowing and exercise of documenting the intermittent constricting of the field of vision.6 rupture of the earth by the industrial excavations of forensic search teams which In the history of technological looking, 7 I use the term ‘observer’ here deliberately to empha- photography sits in the departure lounge size what Jonathan Crary identifies as an action that of this inevitable journey towards the priv- ‘conforms’ and ‘complies’ to seeing ‘within a prescribed set of possibilities’. See Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge 6 Paul Virilio ‘The Museum of Accidents’, in Steve Redhead, Massachusetts: MIT, 1992), pp. 5-6 ed. The Paul Virilio Reader, trans. Chris Turner (New York: 8 See David Farrell, Innocent Landscapes (Stockport: Dewi Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 255-262 Lewis, 2001)

7 Paul Seawright White Flag (from Conflicting Account), 2009 C-Type print mounted on dashboard © Courtesy of the artist

8 have left a trail of wounds across the sur- What characterises face of the Irish landscape. While the ear- the work of the lier series created a disjuncture between photographers in this the aesthetic ideology of the prelapsarian landscape within Irish visual culture and exhibition is a concern the violence that society sought to bury with the rescuing of the and suppress below the surface of its imaginary Arcadia, the extended project is recent past ... a motivation one of mnemonic and historical salvage.9 to rescue the remnants

The decade or so of Farrell’s sporadic of cultural experience interventions into the aftermath of the from their disappearance searches for the disappeared is one of into everyday life. endurance. The work’s controlled, patient unfolding of nature’s reclamation of the scars inflicted upon the landscape, require a reciprocal act of stamina in the viewer’s Along with Farrell’s series, what character- gaze. The series of photographs of what ises the work of the photographers in this Farrell describes as the ‘swallowing tree’ exhibition is a concern with the rescuing of metaphorically depict this demand on the the recent past. Although the subjects viewer. As the bark of the tree envelops they photograph are dispersed across a the photographica of religious memori- vast geographical and political terrain, alisation into its organic skin, the viewer what they share is a motivation to rescue is confronted with the transitory nature the remnants of cultural experience of remembrance. The photographs force from their disappearance into everyday the viewer’s recognition that it is not just life. This is motivated not by what many the past that threatens to disappear into commentators have suggested as being its fragile traces marked upon the earth; contemporary cultures ‘obsession with it is also the memory of the past that is in the issue of memory’.10 Rather, if the de- danger of dissolving into the archives of cade leading up to the turn of the last our mind. Farrell’s series requires the view- century was marked by an anxiety towards er to stay with it, to endure the relentless what the future had in store, the first confrontation with the trauma of the past of the new millennium has been recoiling as a reminder that memory is at work. in the fear of the past. It is not that there is not enough history in the present, but that there is too much of it; so much that 9 On the earlier series see; Mark Phelan, ‘Not so Innocent the past has become unruly, a threat to Landscapes: Remembrance, Representation and the Disappeared’, in Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon, eds., the future envisaged by the neo-liberalism Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 285-316; and Justin Carville, ‘Re-negotiated Territory: The Politics of Place, 10 See in particular Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Space and Landscape in Irish Photography’, Afterimage, Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 29. 1 (2001), pp. 5-9 1995), p. 7

9 David Farrell From the series ‘Small Acts of Memory’, Coghalstown Wood, Wilkinstown, 28 February 2010 Giclée print © Courtesy of the artist

10 Richard Mosse C-47 Alberta, from the series The Fall, 2009 Digital c-print facemounted to plexi © Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

11 dream of temporary contract over per- nomic despair from the cultural amnesia manent relations.11 This is why the ‘long which threatens to cloak them in a misty view’ is such a subversive photographic dawn of another future. They confront the strategy; it resists the contemporary urge present with its own short-sightedness in to erase the recent past, to bury it beneath imagining a future without learning from the clean, liquid surface of the ‘now’. the failures of recent history. Instead it confronts contemporary culture with its own myopia. Donovan Wylie’s Watchtowers and Paul Seawright’s Conflicting Account, both Anthony Haughey’s series of photographs adopt the strategy of ‘late’ or ‘cool’ photog- of Ireland’s ‘ghost estates’, Settlement, raphy engaged by both Farrell and depict the false monuments to the country’s Haughey.12 Disengaged from the ‘hot’ pho- prosperity in the ambient light between tography that depicts events in medias dusk and dawn. In a landscape littered res, in the midst of the action, its forensic with historical ruins, Haughey projects detachment slows down the pace of an image of Ireland’s newest ruins drawn the photograph and the viewers’ contem- down to the earth not through the power plation of what it depicts within the picto- of decay by the force of nature, but the rial space of the image. Wylie’s elevated speculative forces of capital. Many of these perspective of decommissioned military housing estates were constructed through surveillance towers, depict the panoptic a series of leaps of faith that the future space of the militarised gaze before their was certain. Land was speculatively rectilinear architectural forms had been bought on the promise of rezoning for dismantled.13 The series compiles a vast development, houses purchased off plans, aerial cartography of militaristic surveil- mortgages offered on the potential of the lance whose elevated presence is on the future escalation of financial capital. In brink of being erased from Northern Ire- the midst of the catastrophe of Ireland’s land’s post-conflict landscape. Wylie’s se- economic collapse the prevailing political ries might be categorised within what has philosophy is to move forward inexorably been identified as the ‘archival impulse’ in towards the future, as if ignoring what has recent post-conflict visual culture, just happened will make the trauma mapping the coordinates of a past in the of the recent past disappear. Haughey’s process of transformation.14 photographs are an important intervention 12 On the concept of late photography see; David Campany, ‘Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on Problems of ‘Late into the myth of Ireland’s prosperity that Photography’’, in David Green, ed., Where is the Photo- was frequently visualised through graph? (Brighton and Kent: Photoworks and Photoforum, 2003), pp. 123-132 digital imagery that projected the ‘futures- 13 See Donovan Wylie, British Watchtowers (Göttigen: Steidl, cape’ of domestic housing. Haughey’s 2007) 14 The term ‘archival impulse’ is Hal Foster’s see, ‘An Archival photographs rescue these ruins of eco- Impulse’, October, 110 (2004), pp. 3–22. On the archive within post-conflict art see; Colin Graham, ‘’Every Passer-by a Culprit?’: Archive Fever, Photography and the Peace in Bel- 11 This point is made by Jean-François Lyotard, The Post- fast’, Third Text 19. 5 (2005), pp. 567-580 and Fiona Barber, modern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Archiving Place & Time (Portadown and Manchester: Millen- Press, 1984), p. 66 nium Court and Manchester Metropolitan University, 2009)

12 Paul Seawright’s Conflicting Account is photographs illuminate these forgotten his- similarly immersed in the preservation of tories, rescuing them from dissolution into the historical moment at which the past is the amnesia of everyday life. in the process of being suppressed by the new dispensation of the peace process. Jackie Nickerson’s approach differs from Moving between the interior of institutional that of the other photographers in this spaces and the external ‘memoryscapes’ of exhibition in that her series Gulf is the result wall murals and monuments, he pulls on the of a sustained exploration of the experience latent potential of the fragment to establish of modernity within the Arabian peninsula. connections and networks within and be- The ‘long view’ adopted by Nickerson is tween other fragmentary forms. Seawright’s the unfolding of the conjunction between photographs are an intervention into what tradition and modernity, the emergence has been termed the ongoing white-wash- of new topographies and their shaping of ing of memory within Northern Ireland’s everyday experience. What she shares with topographies of conflict. By depicting the the other photographers is the recognition processes of erasure and containment of of the ongoing productive force of the past the visible traces of sectarianism, Seawright’s in shaping our understanding of the present. photographs do not seek to preserve the Documenting the steady march of urban past, but rather that moment when lived development, her photographs provide history is under threat of erasure. In this way, a detached observation of the cultural the work serves to highlight the inadequacy specificities of negotiating the collision of a culture that seeks to re-cast the memory between lived history and the detachment spaces of the post-conflict landscape. of globalization.

Richard Mosse’s photograph from The Fall, There is an old Soviet saying that states; turns to the ruins of industrial warfare the future is certain, it is only the past that that lay scattered across remote locations. is unpredictable. In the optics of the ‘long Long forgotten, these detritus of moderni- view’ history endures as an unpredictable ty are photographed in their hollowed out force to be reckoned with, the past as image form that has been stripped bare by the continually threatening to disrupt the elements and the erosion of time. The scale current fascination with the ongoing moment of Mosse’s prints monumentalise these of instantaneous communication. The decel- small histories of industrial modernity’s erated gaze of the ‘long view’ not only slows failures, those blips and interruptions to down perception, it establishes distance so the utopian dream of air travel’s relentless that the myopia that characterises contem- collapse of time and space.15 These are ruins porary visual culture can be avoided. To that are meant to be forgotten, abandoned return to Plato, we might conclude that in to the wilderness, they are not supposed to the optics of the long view, ‘You must use emerge as an industrial antiquity. Mosse’s your own eyes’.16

15 On time space compression within cultural modernity see; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 260-283 16 Plato, The Republic, p. 371 13 David Farrell

Small Acts of Memory

Small Acts of Memory is the most recent In 2009 the forensic search team moved work to emerge from David Farrell’s to another location, Coghalstown Wood, longterm engagement with the search in Wilkinstown, County Meath which is for the bodies of those who were ‘disap- considered to be the burial place of peared’ by the Republican movement Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, who during the conflict in Northern Ireland. were disappeared in 1972. Over a period of a year, Coghalstown Wood was searched In his award-winning Innocent Landscapes meticulously, but to no avail. series, Farrell explored the first searches, which began in 1999 and came to a halt in Small Acts of Memory is a series of photo- 2000. They sought to locate the remains graphs made over the four seasons of this of a total of nine missing people in seven relentless and yet fruitless search. Since separate sites. Only three remains were 2009 he has also photographed new and recovered. This unresolved issue was fur- resumed searches at a number of loca- ther complicated by others who had been tions and on a recent revisit to disappeared but not formally acknowl- Coghalstown Wood he discovered that a edged by the Republican movement in further small unsuccessful search had their 1999 statement of admission. again taken place in April 2011. The human desire for truth and closure is unending, Since the publication of Innocent Landscapes, the door is both half open and half closed. Farrell has been revisiting these places, tranquil sites where deep conflicts between personal and political geogra- phies and between acknowledged and suppressed memory are played out. In his repeated re-visits, he records how nature has begun to subsume all traces of the searches that had taken place there.

In 2007, while on a revisit to Ballynultagh in County Wicklow he discovered that a low- key search had again been initiated by a team of forensic archaeologists under the remit of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains. This on- off search over the period of a year finally located the partial remains of David Farrell From the series ‘Small Acts of Memory’, Coghalstown Wood, Danny McIlhone. Wilkinstown, 10 October 2010 Giclée print © Courtesy of the artist 14 David Farrell’s ‘Small Acts of Memory’ in the exhibition The Long View, at the Gallery of Photography, Ireland (2011)

15 David Farrell From the series ‘Small Acts of Memory’, Coghalstown Wood, Wilkinstown, 7 February 2010 Giclée print © Courtesy of the artist

16 Anthony Haughey

Settlement

In his work, Anthony Haughey has consis- 1920s. Through Haughey’s lens, the ghost tently been concerned with how social and estates are recast as eerie ‘monuments’. economic forces shape the natural land- They are a testament to the end of Ire- scape, be it the effects of mass emigra- land’s gold rush and the resulting cost of tion in the West of Ireland explored in Edge unregulated growth. of Europe, or the traces of recent conflicts in Europe in Disputed Territory. His most recent, ongoing project, Settlement charts the fallout from the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy.

Even in villages and small towns private developers and credit rich individuals availed of favorable government tax breaks and laissez faire planning legis- lation to hastily build domestic housing estates for quick profit and to meet the demands of a growing population. But after the banks foreclosed on developers’ loans, all building projects across the state ceased and more than fifteen years of unprecedented growth came to an abrupt end. Now there are more than 620 ‘ghost estates’ and thousands of unfinished houses throughout Ireland.

All the photographs in this series are produced between sunset and sunrise, partly to avoid confrontation with security guards who regularly patrol these sites during the daytime. The combination of darkness, artificial light and long expo- Anthony Haughey sures draws attention to the effects of ‘Untitled I’, from the series ‘Settlement’, 2011 development on the natural environment. Lambda c-print facemounted to plexi © Courtesy of the artist It also sets up subtle visual parallels with the last historic convulsion in the fabric of Ireland’s domestic landscape – the widespread burning of ‘Big Houses’ in the

17 Anthony Haughey ‘Untitled XII’, from the series ‘Settlement’, 2011 Lambda c-print facemounted to plexi © Courtesy of the artist

18 Anthony Haughey ‘Untitled IV’, from the series ‘Settlement’, 2011 Lambda c-print facemounted to plexi © Courtesy of the artist

19 Richard Mosse

The Fall

An airliner in vertical descent is symbolic air wrecks in the deep wilderness through of modernity’s failure. For this reason, air online flickr forums of amateur ‘wreck- transport is highly prized by the terrorist. A chasers’, Mosse then makes the epic jour- plane crash is horrifying but also aesthet- ney to revisit these isolated sites with an ically powerful. It speaks of unstoppable obsolete wooden view camera, enlarging globalization, emphasizing distressing the final landscape prints to the grand parallels between tourism and war, power scale of classical history painting. and fear, technology and disaster. Yet in The work is an attempt to reclaim the spite of this aesthetic leverage, or perhaps primeval landscape for our imagination because of it, the air disaster is taboo in and to articulate the fragility of human the Western world. If a plane goes down it civilization. is instantly cordoned off, rapidly removed, and forgotten. We would rather not perceive the trauma.

In his series, The Fall, Richard Mosse lo- cates crashed plane sites forgotten in the deep wilderness of the Arctic Circle, the Patagonian Andes, or on tropical islands. After fifty summers, the wrecked aircraft’s utra-modern form has become a part of the primeval landscape. Its shattered carapace lies scorched by the sun and scoured by extreme winters. Redolent of science fiction, these Futurist antiques have been partially cannibalized, an ephemeral skein of shattered aluminium. Eschewing narrative drama by decontex- tualizing the wreck, Moss concentrates on their sinister sculptural form placed absurdly in the wilderness.

Terrorism is very difficult to express with traditional documentary realism. It is difficult to perceive in its own right. Instead, Mosse chooses a hybrid of 19th century Survey photography ramified by a process Richard Mosse of contemporary re-photography. Locating C-47 Alberta, from the series The Fall, 2009 Digital c-print facemounted to plexi © Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY 20 Richard Mosse 707 Damascus, from the series The Fall, 2008 Digital c-print facemounted to plexi © Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

21 Richard Mosse Curtiss Commando Manitoba, from the series The Fall, 2009 Digital c-print facemounted to plexi © Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

22 Jackie Nickerson

Gulf

Jackie Nickerson’s photographic practice ticularity and ethnicity whilst the global is concerned with a subjective interaction often invokes a sense of uniformity and with the places, communities and cultures commoditised blandness. Nickerson she encounters. Her work actively avoids continues to chart her own particular the use of photojournalistic interpretation course between specific ‘local’ cultures or narrative. She focuses instead on how and the global ‘everywhere’ of the contem- we inhabit our ordinary, everyday worlds, porary developed world. presenting her own, often ambivalent, subjective position.

Aiden Dunne has written that ‘Nickerson is interested in rendering visible this usually invisible sense of the everyday. She tries to depict the everyday, a reality that we take for granted and do not think of as being particularly noteworthy.’1

Her work is also concerned with the position of the individual within a broader community or society. Her powerful, considered portraits are imbued with an acute sense of the subject’s self-awareness in the moment of the image making. The artist’s own presence is also a strong feature in her photographs. Her work displays a refreshing honesty about the difficulties of producing photographic works – Nickerson acknowledges rather than conceals the inherent tensions involved in the act of making a photograph.

Produced over a ten-year period in the Arabian peninsula, Gulf explores the new constructed landscapes which emerge from the juxtaposition of the old and the new. The local can suggest a sense of par-

Jackie Nickerson From the series ‘A Day at the Beach’, 2005 1 Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, 23 May 2011 Digital c-prints © Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY 23 Jackie Nickerson From the series ‘A Day at the Beach’, 2005 Digital c-prints © Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

24 Jackie Nickerson ‘Supermarket II’, from the series ‘Gulf’, 2002 Digital c-prints © Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

25 Jackie Nickerson ‘Untitled II’, from the series ‘Gulf’, 2002 Digital c-prints © Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

26 Paul Seawright

Conflicting Account

Conflicting Account examines the dispa- Working in history classrooms of Protes- rate and often conflicting narratives of tant and Catholic schools and on housing Northern Irish history. projects from both communities, Seawright recovers visual fragments and Graham Dawson writes that ‘the conflict- texts which represent the layering of ed terrain of the Irish past is occupied by narrative, a continual writing and re-writ- two powerful grand narratives, one loyalist ing of history and the conflicting rhetoric and protestant, the other nationalist and of two traditions. catholic. These furnish different and mu- tually antagonistic ways of telling the story In this series, Seawright’s embedded po- of Ireland, two competing constructions of sition is evidenced in the forced closeup, the same history. There is no pure form of where the frame serves to occlude as these two stories, which exist only in the much as to reveal. Within the visual field range of their tellings and re-tellings, with itself, the bland surfaces of the urban numerous variations and difference of everyday are suddenly ignited with ambi- emphasis and nuance, across a variety of guity. Marks and erasures, both stuttering modes and media of representation.’1 and strident, point to the continued play of competing claims to meaning and identity in a post-conflict context.

Paul Seawright ‘Volunteer’ from the series ‘Conflicting Account’, 2009 C-type print mounted on diabond © Courtesy of the artist

1Graham Dawson, Making Peace with the Past: Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (MUP, 2007)

27 Paul Seawright ‘And’, from the series ‘Conflicting Account’, 2009 C-type print mounted on diabond © Courtesy of the artist

Paul Seawright ‘Erased Texts’, from the series ‘Conflicting Account’, 2009 C-type print mounted on diabond © Courtesy of the artist

28 Paul Seawright ‘Smiles’, from the series ‘Conflicting Account’, 2009 C-type print mounted on diabond © Courtesy of the artist

Paul Seawright ‘Police’, from the series ‘Conflicting Account’, 2009 C-type print mounted on diabond © Courtesy of the artist 29 Donovan Wylie

British Watchtowers

Alongside his work on The Maze (2004 The lines of sight from the watchtowers and 2007/8), ‘British Watchtowers’ marks generated a kind of virtual environment a significant development in Donovan enveloping the border region of Northern Wylie’s long-standing engagement with Ireland. These high-tech towers, construct- the architecture of conflict. ed in the mid 1980s, primarily in the moun- tainous border region of south Armagh, were landmarks in the thirty-year conflict in Observation, whether by the human eye, or Northern Ireland. the technical eye of a surveillance camera, requires an architectural structure that For a period of over a year, Donovan Wylie elevates the viewer into a position of com- photographed the borderland watchtowers. mand. During the Iron Age, hill forts were Working entirely from an elevated position built on natural promontories to survey enabled by military helicopter he created a the surrounding landscape. Two thousand systematic aerial mapping of the tow- years later, the British army used a similar ers, deftly turning the surveyors into the system of watchtowers to survey the terri- surveyed. The towers were finally demol- tories of Northern Ireland, and to observe ished between 2003 and 2007 as part of the British government’s demilitarization the actions of the local people. programme for Northern Ireland.

Donovan Wylie ‘South Armagh. Romeo 12.’ from the series British Watchtowers, 2005 Digital print © Courtesy of the artist and MAGNUM photos 30 Donovan Wylie ‘Golf 40W’, from the series British Watchtowers, 2005 Digital print © Courtesy of the artist and MAGNUM photos

31 Donovan Wylie ‘Golf 40W, view 2006’, from the series British Watchtowers, 2006 Digital print © Courtesy of the artist and MAGNUM photos

32 Timothy Prus / Donovan Wylie

Scrapbook (Steidl, 2009)

Scrapbooks or albums are an immediate Donovan Wylie and Timothy Prus have and democratic form of diary making. recreated a non-sectarian version with the The sectarian violence in Northern Ireland benefit of hindsight. Wylie, son of a mixed permeated households and extended marriage, grew up in Belfast during a peri- into personal albums where family photos od when identification with one side of the and memorabilia sat alongside clippings sectarian divide or another was an essen- from newspapers. As inherently open and tial component of everyday life. Scrapbook volatile forms, these scrapbooks often gives the authors’ personal view of an era. constructed odd timelines, freely mixing Scrapbook is co-published by Steidl and the personal and the public. They also the Archive of Modern Conflict (2009) have the capacity to encompass a wide range of emotional responses to the lived situation.

34 Prints from Scrapbook in the Gallery of Photography exhibition, The Long View (2011)

36 Artist biographies

David Farrell Richard Mosse

David Farrell was born in Dublin. He read Chemistry Richard Mosse (b. 1980) was born and raised at UCD graduating with a Ph.D. in 1987. He won the in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Mosse studied at European Publishers Award for Photography Yale, Goldsmiths and the London Consortium. in 2001 for ‘Innocent Landscapes’. In 2004 he In 2008-2010 he was a Leonore Annenberg participated in the ‘European Eyes on Japan’ Fellow in the Performing and Visual Arts and project. ‘Crow’, his collaborative multimedia in 2011-2012 he will be a Guggenheim Fellow film with composer Benjamin Dwyer, was in Photography. His work has been exhibited premiered at the National Concert Hall Dublin at Akademie der Kunste, Barbican Art Gallery, in 2005. He has worked independently and on Fotofest Houston, The Kemper Museum, MCA ‘communion’ projects with partner Gogo della Chicago, Museu de Mataro, Nelson Atkins Luna (Gudòk). He has exhibited widely in solo Museum, Palais de Tokyo and Tate Modern. and group exhibitions including: Pinyang Festival of Photography, Pinyang, Images courtesy of the artist and Jack Shain- China, 2008; Il Camino della Via Francigena; man Gallery, New York. Festival Internazionale di Fotografia, Rome, 2008; FOTO ARTE – Brasília, Museu Nacional www.richardmosse.com du Brasil, 2007; Noorderlicht Festival, ‘Act of Faith’, Groningen, 2007; ‘AfterShock’, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, and Houston FotoFest, 2006. Anthony Haughey A documentary film ‘David Farrell - Elusive Moments’ by Donald Taylor Black (Poolbeg Anthony Haughey was born in Northern Ireland. Productions), was released in 2008. His work in He is an artist and lecturer/researcher in the included in the collections of The Central Bank, School of Media at the Dublin Institute of Dublin, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Technology. His work has been widely exhibited European Central Bank, Dundalk Institute of nationally and internationally, most recently in Technology and IADT-Dun Laoghaire, Dublin. the New York Photo Festival, TULCA 10, He is currently working as a lecturer in photography Crawford Art Gallery and the Korea Foundation in in IADT-Dun Laoghaire. Seoul. Forthcoming exhibitions include Dublin Contemporary, Helsinki Photography Festival www.davidfarrell.org and Künstlerhaus S11 in Solothurn. He was a See also Farrell’s ongoing blog about the work recipient of the European CNA Mosaique at http://source.ie/blog/ Award in 2000. Monographs include The Edge of Europe (1996); Disputed Territory (2006) and an artist’s book State (2011). His work is represented in many public and private collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the National Media Museum, Bradford; Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.

www.anthonyhaughey.com

37 Paul Seawright Jackie Nickerson

Paul Seawright was born in Belfast. He is a Jackie Nickerson is a much-travelled photographer photographer who has drawn on his Northern who has lived for some time in the United States, Irish background to produce photographic Africa and Europe. She now divides her time investigations of aspects of its fraught political between Ireland and New York. FARM, her terrain, as in his ‘Orange Order’ and ‘Police book of portraits of farm workers taken all over Force’ series from the early 1990s. In his recent southern Africa, was published by Jonathan work Seawright has moved away from an Cape in 2002. In 2007 SteidlMack published overtly Irish context, focusing on what he has FAITH, her long-term project on religious termed a ‘generic malevolent landscape’. communities in Ireland. In 2008 she won The Seawright has exhibited in many venues AIB Art Prize, and has been shortlisted for the throughout Europe and North and South Deutscher Fotobuchpreis award (2008) and America. Among other venues, he has had solo been nominated for several prestigious prizes exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery, London; such as the Becks Futures Award (2003). Her the Imperial War Museum, London; Milton Keynes series, TEN MILES ROUND, which explores her Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, immediate townland in County Louth, premiered Dublin. Paul Seawright represented Wales in in the Gallery of Photography in 2009. This work the 2003 Venice Biennale. Awards include the has toured extensively to major venues in Europe. prestigious Ville de Paris Artist Award in 1999 Gulf was premiered in the Butler Gallery, Kilken- and the Irish Museum of Modern Art/Glen Dimplex ny in 2010. Nickerson’s work is represented in Prize in 1997. He is represented in the collec- many important collections including the tions of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Irish Museum Art, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the of Modern Art and the Rubell Collection, USA. Imperial War Museum, London, the Art Institute She is represented by the Jack Shainman of Chicago and the International Center of Gallery, New York. Photography, New York among others and in numerous private collections. He is Professor www.jackienickerson.com of Photography at the University of Ulster. He is represented in Ireland by the Kerlin Gallery. www.paulseawright.info

Donovan Wylie

Donovan Wylie was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He left school at 16, and first exhibited at The Gallery of Photography in 1987. He went on to embark on a three-month journey around Ireland that resulted in “32 Counties,” published while he was still a teenager. His film, The Train, won a BAFTA in 2001. He has had solo and group exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery, London; PhotoEspana, Madrid, the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television, England; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris. Wylie was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2010 for his exhibition MAZE 2007/8 at Belfast Exposed. In 2010 he was awarded the Bradford Fellowship and in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum, London, he documented Canadian military bases in Afghanistan. This work will be published in September 2011. He is a member of Magnum Photos since 1997. 38 The Long View publication

Dublin: The Gallery of Photography, 2011 Book design: redmanAKA

This book brought together representative work from each artist featured in the exhibition and made the work available to the wider public.

39 Gallery of Photography Ireland is the national centre for photography. Our role is to promote an appreciation and awareness of photography as an artform in Ireland. A pub- licly funded, not-for-profit organisation, we are committed to making our programme of exhibitions accessible to the broadest possible audience. As a key part of this commit- ment the Gallery offers tours to second and third-level students. To facilitate these tours, we provide a number of resources for educators to help direct engagement with the work of exhibiting artists. In addition to the introduction and specially commissioned essay in this publication, below is a list of questions that can be used by teachers/ tutors to lead class discussion.

• How would you describe the visual styles that these artists use?

• What are some of the differences between them? What are the similarities?

• The title of this exhibition is The Long View. How do you think the artists represent this? Do they share common photographic motivations for representing the landscapes of geopolitical borders?

• Do you think the artists give you a clear idea of the Northern Irish border experience? If so, how is this communicated?

• How would you describe the different approaches these artists take to representing the Northern Irish border?

• Does this have an effect on the way we understand their work?

• In his essay about the exhibition, Justin Carville describes how the artists turn their attention to the ‘decelerated gaze’? What are some of the different ways they do this?

Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland T. +3531-6714654 www.galleryofphotography.ie